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AJC.com: Money walks in Ga.

We are accustomed to thinking of Georgia, and in particular metro Atlanta, as a magnet for refugees from New England and the Rust Belt. Our region has grown so fast for so long that this fact is taken for granted and even, by some people, lamented.

We usually think of this growth in terms of people: For example, the population of what’s now considered metro Atlanta has nearly quadrupled in the past half-century. But what about the money that came with all those people? And what if the flood of people and their money slowed substantially?

These are the kind of questions raised by a new book, “How Money Walks.” The author, Travis H. Brown, analyzed IRS data from 1995 through 2010 to see how much income shifted as Americans moved from state to state — and found the total for those years surpassed $2 trillion nationwide.